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Although our version of Stairball is probably the most interesting game ever to go by that name, it is not the first. Adam drafted the first set of rules in 2002, with the first IM mentioning the rules dated December 4th, 2002, but there were undoubtedly others aspiring to create a game named “stairball” before then. So long as humans had stairs and balls, it was inevitable that some people would put the two together. Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find many of the instances of “stairball” that I found when I first did a Google search, because our version of stairball seems to have taken over many of the top hits, due to this blog and the NY Times mention. I had to search for stairball on Clusty, a search engine that groups results into categories. That turned up several results:

Stairball.com – In an outdated list of informal sports, I found a broken link to Stairball.com, a site dedicated to “the most exciting game in your house!” The one line description tells us that “Stairball is similar to playing soccer, but in the staircase of your home.” When I looked up an archived copy of the website on the Internet Archive, the website itself said:

The general idea: The Stair player stands at the top of the stairs and throws the ball at the stairs and towards the floor player. The floor player attempts to prevent the ball from reaching the floor (or wall behind him) by using the same parts of his/her body used in soccer (i.e. everything but arms).

The site seems to have first appeared around December 2000, and died sometime in 2003, no doubt in the wake of the Dot-com bubble. At any rate, maybe this means we can steal the domain name ^_^

Bored kids create their own entertainment – In an example that brings joy to my heart, two boys aged 11 and 14 were allowed to skip summer camp in 2005 and “just hang out”, creating their own golf course and inventing a game named “stairball”! Unfortunately, the description of stairball is tantalizingly terse:

Hanging out for Sawyer, though, is not just sitting around. Sawyer and Cody play pool basketball, golf on the course they created and make up games in the house like “Stairball,” where they bounce balls off steps.”We set up targets on the wall and whoever gets to 1,000 first wins,” he said.

Argh! That doesn’t tell us enough for us to reconstruct the game. What wall did they set up the targets on? How are points scored? What sort of targets? What sort of ball? Were they bouncing the balls up the stairs, down the stairs, or backwards off of the stairs? I suppose we’ll never know.

Handball variant – I don’t know what the context of this is, but in an article entitled A “Z Games” Sampler from 1999, the Christian Science Monitor suggested this conception of stairball:

Stairball – A game similar to one-wall handball. Two players take turns hitting a ball up a staircase. Points are awarded when a player’s opponent fails to return the ball as it bounces down the stairs.

This sounds boringly unoriginal. I do wonder what “Z Games” are, though… very mysterious.

Cats and dogs chase balls down stairs – This is a mindless variant of “go fetch”, but apparently it is endlessly entertaining to animals:

Casper (the friendly ghost cat) was adopted from a local shelter for which I now do volunteer work. He talks all the time in a soft purr/meow voice and loves to play. His favorite game is “Stairball,” which involves me throwing a paper ball down the basement stairs which he will usually retrieve.

In a similar vein, apparently small children like playing “catch” with one party at the top of the stairs and the other at the bottom (A good game of stairball with Sissy and Mommy). This is actually the first step towards playing real stairball! These children are getting good practice throwing and catching for our tournaments 🙂

ABC football – This is not actually a game called stairball, but it is an unusual invented game which features the term “stairball” in its description, so I thought it deserved a mention 🙂

Pitch: Either ends of the A Block first floor corridor are designated as goals. Use the short sides without doors – using the long sides would defeat the object of the game as far as their is one, and will also piss people off more than a normal game does as their door is then part of the goal. The stairs to the ground floor are off the pitch – if the ball goes down there, the player who last touched it has to fetch it, and the player who didn’t gets a free kick from the top of the stairs. The kitchen, toilet, stairs to the upper floors and anyones’ room with an open door are fair game, as long as the entrance of the ball into that area is announced in a deep, slow, and stupid voice (eg “kitchenball!”, “stairball!“, or “Martynball!”).

Just because we invented an awesome game called stairball (the awesomest ever), that doesn’t mean you can’t invent one too! Make your own games, they’re too important to let other people make them for you 😉

One of the most important parts of the Cylinder as I have presented it is coming up with the goal words and the start. A logical question would be, can you find five words that are all pairwise five links apart, that is, can we find five words that use 25 different letters? I wonder if Google has an answer for this… the last time I checked, no one had done it, to my knowledge. The question is difficult to generalize, because no other number of letters offers a comparable challenge. Maybe I could say, can we find five six-letter words that use all 26 letters? (This also sounds super tough to me.)

But that’s not a puzzle, and I promised you a puzzle! So here’s something you can think about. Can you find six four-letter words that use 24 separate letters? I was able to complete this challenge last year, and to my knowledge everyone to whom I’ve shown this puzzle has not been able to do it (I may be wrong about this). But I know I’ve done it. And I’ll let you think about it for a little bit; then I’ll post my solution as a comment to this entry in about a week. The real challenge is finding the right word that uses the letter Y as the vowel. You might try a feline… that’s all the help I’ll give. Good luck.